Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"AVCHD from the Lumix cameras has several drawbacks IMHO. It is difficult to edit in most NLE programs unless transcoding into AVI, the compression leaves large areas such as grass patches rendered without detail and has a general overall soft quality. This sequence, directly shot to compare the quality of unadjusted clips from AVCHD and MJPEG, looks at static and dynamic images, closeup and distant images to get a comprehensive view of the results. The two formats were assembled into a 1280 x 720 50fps timeline and exported as a mpeg4 file."

I generally set my Panasonic cameras to record in AVCHD, but after watching this video and thinking about how I use the video clips, I'm going to change my cameras to use MJPEG. I tend to edit all my video clips, so for me it makes sense to capture clips with as little compression as possible - and that means MJPEG. I have 16 GB cards in my cameras, and haven't come close to running out of space yet, so I'm not concerned with the added storage MJPEG takes up. If you're someone that tends not to edit your clips and just saves them as-is, AVCHD might make more sense. What video format do you use on your digital camera?

Roxio's Easy VHS to DVD product is an affordable ($59.99 USD, Affiliate) video capture solution. I digitized my main family home video tape years ago, but I have a few VHS tapes still kicking around and I wanted to see what the current solutions are able to deliver. I contacted Roxio to ask to check out their Easy VHS to DVD product, and they sent one my way. Here's my experience using it. Read more...

I first saw the Pinnacle Video Transfer at CES 2008, and I was immediately impressed by the product. A small, dedicated hardware-based h.264 video encoder with simple input and output? Sounds like a winner, right? It could have been, but it's missing a critical component. Let's start with what it can do, then get to what it can't do. It has inputs on one side: composite video and stereo audio. So right there we're talking about bottom-end input quality. But for most people, that falls into the "good enough" category, so it's not a huge problem. On the other end there's a USB 2.0 port that you connect a hard drive or USB Flash drive to. Even an iPod will work! The big button in the middle? You press the Mode part of the button to cycle through the quality modes: Good (320 x 240, 768 kbps h.264 video, 64 kbps audio), Better (640 x 480, 1.2 mbps h.264 video, 128 kbps audio), and Best (720 x 480, 1.5 h.264 mbps video, 192 kbps audio). When you want to start recording the video, you press the REC (record) part of the button. When you want to stop recording, you press it again. When it's finished writing the file to your storage device, it stops blinking. Simple, minimalist design. Sounds brilliant, right? Nope. Read more...

"Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Vincent Laforet got his hands on a Canon 5D MkII for a weekend. Rather than shoot some quick stills, he rounded up an entire film crew and put them to work using the amazing 1080p video capture it offers - in helicopters, no less! When SmugMug heard about this, we went bananas and offered to host both the short film itself, Reverie, as well as the Behind the Scenes footage."

Seeing is believing, so the best thing I can say is to watch the video: there's a Quicktime version of the video over on Canon's site, or there's the h.264 Flash-based version on Smugmug. They both look great! Vincent Laforet's blog has a bunch of info about the video, how hit was shot, etc. I really have to hand it to Canon, they've created a whole new generation of DSLRs with shockingly impressive video capabilities. I want to see this type of technology trickle down to Canon's point and shoot line - it's ridiculous that the best Canon has done with their small cameras is 640 x 480 resolution video, though with one camera they've finally moved to h.264. I wouldn't expect the same quality of video on a small $400 point and shoot camera, but at the very least I hope Canon gives us h.264 720p video (and no, the TX1 doesn't count).